Generally, equipment referred to as a power converter, inverter or drive is used to provide power to another piece of equipment such as a motor. Specifically, such a converter (converter is used generally herein to refer to converters, inverters and drives) is coupled to a utility connection to receive incoming input power such as three-phase AC power. The converter conditions the power to provide a conditioned power signal to the equipment to be powered. In this way, incoming power to the equipment may be of improved efficiency, leading to reduced costs to operate the equipment.
Multi-level power converters have been gaining popularity mainly due to improved power quality, lower switching losses, better electromagnetic compatibility, and higher voltage capability. These improvements in power conversion are achieved by using a multiple voltage step strategy. One common multi-level inverter topology is a series H-bridge inverter, in which multiple H-bridge inverters are connected in series. Since this topology consists of series power conversion cells, the voltage and power level may be easily scaled.
Typically, commercial converters are built up based on modular units, namely, power conversion cells, which are generally of a three-phase diode-based front-end rectifier, a DC-link capacitor bank, and a single-phase full-wave inverter. Using such cells, improved power quality at both the AC system and the motor sides can be realized.
However, this topology requires a large number of isolated DC voltage sources to supply each cell. The common practice is to use an isolation transformer to supply a rectifier of a power cell. However, the supply current to the rectifier contains many harmonic current components, which can be very disturbing for equipment and power systems, and cause electromagnetic interference (EMI).
Further, the normal operation of the inverter in each cell generates a large secondary current harmonic that is injected back into the DC-link capacitor. Thus a very large capacitor bank has to be used in order to reduce the voltage ripple. For a medium voltage drive operating at a voltage range of between approximately 4160 and 13800 volts, this capacitance bank can be on the order of between approximately 0.04 and 0.5 Farads. Besides, the diode-based rectifier does not provide control over the reactive input current component, and the diode-based rectifier does not provide the regenerative operating mode as required, for instance, by downhill belt conveyors in mining applications, where this operating mode is the normal one, as several megawatts are required to be taken back to the AC drive.
Voltage and current harmonics in power transmission and distribution have become a serious problem. To limit the harmonic components of the input current of the drive, often phase-shifted multi-windings isolation transformers are used to supply power to the cells. However, to meet the requirements of the IEEE 519 standard, the impedance of the transformer should be high (typically on the order of approximately 8 to 15% PU for medium voltage drives) and a large amount of capacitance must be accommodated in the DC bus of power cells, which make both transformers and power cells bulky and expensive.